Elektra

Thursday, February 12, 2009

David Scott Marley on KALW

I hear that Bay Area librettist David Scott Marley will be on KALW 91.7 today at 1 p.m., discussing his adaptation of Tales of Hoffman, which Berkeley Opera will be performing from February 28 to March 8.

6 comments:

I have a quetion (Im not taking you for Tommasini, I'm sorry but Ilike your blog would like to know your opinion). I am planning to give my father a subscription to a classical music magazine for his 60th bday and I can't decide whether to get him a subscription for International Record Review, Fanfare, Gramophone, BBC or other. What do you suggest?

Hi, thanks for your reply. He lives in Puerto Rico. Well, when I grew up we used to listen to a lot classical guitar music because he was a classical guitar musician but he stopped listening to that at some point in the early 80s. After that I remember listening to lots of Second Viennese School repertoire, but also romantic and post romantic repertoire. Let me think... aside from berg, schoenberg, webern et al he used to like shumann, mendelssohn, als late romant. like Mahler...what else, well... Haydn, but also Handel (although i remember more 19 and 20th century music than baroque), I'd say it was pretty eclectic. I do remember listening more to symphony than chamber music. What do you recommend? He does not go out or travel much so I guess he'll be more interested in recordings than concerts or festival info.

That's suitably eclectic! I wish there were a print review-oriented journal that I thought unproblematic. The Gramophone never has anything bad to say about British musicians or music; Fanfare has had its share of controversies, where reviewers get something SO WRONG they never hear the end of it. Technically wrong, I mean, not in their opinions. I think either of those would be fun to get him, with the appropriate "grain of salt" caveat.

He is a musician, so if he is interested in more historically-oriented music writing, there are two musicology journals he might like: 19th Century Music or the Journal of the American Musicological Society. They are both very technical. He might like that, or might not.